Email Marketing Metrics

Association of Strategic Marketing October 30, 2012 — 1,279 views

Email Marketing Metrics

Email marketing is one of the best online marketing strategies around, and is a great way to drive highly targeted traffic to your website. This online marketing technique routinely provides some of the highest ROI figures in the online advertising industry, making it appealing to just about every type of business. However, in order to get the most out of your email marketing campaigns, it is important that you pay attention to several key metrics.

Open Rate

The open rate of an email marketing campaign is the first metric you need to focus on when looking to run a successful campaign. If no one is opening your email messages, they will be unable to view the products or services you are promoting. A good way to improve your open rate is to split test a variety of subject lines and sender titles. If you can create an attention grabbing subject line, you will see many more people become interested in your emails and read the contents.

Click Through Rate

After you have optimized your open rate, the next metric you will want to focus on is your click through rate. Your click through rate is a metric that lets you know the number of people who clicked on a link in your email and visited your website. The copy you use when creating your email marketing message will have a dramatic effect on your campaign’s click through rate. Testing several different emails will enable you to see which aspects of your email’s copy is leading to a higher click through rate and which aspects need to be altered in order to optimize your campaign.

In addition to your email copy, the URLs you include in your email messages can have an impact on your click through rate. To achieve a high click through rate, you want to use URLs that are short and friendly and do not look spammy in nature. If your email recipient feels they can trust the link you have sent them, they will be more likely to click on it and visit your website.

Complaint Rate

Your complaint rate is the number of people who click the “this is spam” button in their email account. If you receive too many complaints, your delivery rates will be negatively affected as the email service providers will start to filter your email messages to the junk folder or block them all together.

If you feel your complaint rate needs to be lowered in order to ensure a high deliverability rate, try placing your unsubscribe links in plain view so it is as easy as possible for someone to unsubscribe from your marketing list. Also, make the unsubscribe process a one click process to ensure anyone and everyone who wants to opt-out of your list can do so.

Email marketing is still one of the best online marketing strategies a business can use. Working to improve your open rates, click through rates and complaint rates will allow you to run a successful email marketing campaign equipped with tremendous ROI figures.